“Border Blues”. Sounds and Lyrics of Exploitation, Travel, and Solidarity, According to the Migrant Workforce in Mediterranean Agriculture
During the last fifteen years, the migrant workforce has become crucial for Mediterranean agriculture. Despite migrants’ pivotal role in this economic branch, they didn’t gain full access to housing and social rights. Instead, they are subject to forms of intense work exploitation. Accordingly, migrant settlements in rural districts are crucial sites for social reproduction and the organisation/allocation of the agricultural labour force. From a different angle, these sites are permeated by multiple solidarities and dense social relations; here, migrants can access relevant social resources (e.g. work, shelter, information, etc.). For the same reasons, migrants’ settlements in the agricultural sector play a crucial role in shaping migrants’ unauthorised mobility projects and qualify as nodes within wider migration routes. From this perspective, it is crucial to consider migrants’ agency, focusing on their views and the social representations of their conditions.
Within this framework, working on migrants’ musical productions opens new possibilities to explore the ways migrants are taking the floor about their lives, allowing us to engage with the idea of an “aesthetic agency” intersecting music and migration (Bohlman, 2011). If music is a “space of franchise”, it is necessary to understand toward which ends a mobilisation is called (Redmond, 2013). Accordingly, in my ethnographic fieldwork, carried out together with a professional ethnomusicologist, I gathered songs/lyrics and soundscapes produced by migrants in rural settlements in the whole Mediterranean area.
Countering widespread prejudices about migrants' cultural agency, this contribution aims to open an avenue of reflection on the repertories of cultural expression, elaboration, and experimentation that result in migrants’ musical (self)production across the Mediterranean.